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James R Hoffa: Business and Organized Crimes
Hoffa v United States describes the labor union and criminal trials involving James R. Hoffa that began in 1957 and spanned almost a decade to 1967 James R Hoffa rose to popularity as a union activist and president The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), a union of truck drives and warehouse workers. As union president he facilitated the large scale growth of that organization that led to the Teamsters becoming the largest such organization in the United States. Growing from 75,000 members in 1933 to over 1 million members by 1951. The growth of the union was largely facilitated and influenced by organized crime and gangsters in that era. Hoffa was known to associate with gangsters and used their power and influence to solidify their strong hold on the union enterprise. As the Teamsters union grew and its affiliation with organized crime became more brazen as well as the rise of James Hoffa to presidency, the governing body for all unions in the united states (ALF-CIO) voted to oust the Teamsters union from their group of unions only agreeing to keep it as a member under the condition that they replace Hoffa as president, by this time the IBT was bringing in approximately $750,000 to the ALF-CIO. . (Wikipedia n.d) In 1961 James Hoffa, as president of the IBT, was able to forge an agreement among all truck drivers in North America under the national master-freight agreement. This was a crowning achievement for Hoffa and his union career. Figure 1 shows Jimmy Hoffa giving a speech (Wikipedia n.d) During the 1960's during the tenure of Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General there was a strong initiative against organized crime and by extension the entities - like the Teamster union - that provided significant funding to these criminal organizations.(Wikipedia n.d) (Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2004) During the 1960's in addition to his convictions on bribery and jury tampering, James Hoffa was also convicted fraud for illegally arranging many large pension fund loans to leading organized crime figures. The whistle blower was a former Teamster union member who reported these actions to the FBI. He received a five-year sentence to run consecutively to his bribery sentence.(Wikipedia n.d) By 1971, after only serving just under 5 years of his 13 year sentence, President Richard Nixon had Hoffa's sentence commuted to the time served on the condition that Hoffa would not engage in any union activity until 1980. Upon his release he was given a union pension of $1.7 million. This same election year saw the IBT endorsing Republican President Nixon, whereas in previous years the union endorsed Democratic candidates. It has been widely speculated that Hoffa's release was part of a deal between the Republican candidate's administration and the IBT and there was also speculation of a $1 million payout as well as bribes and kickbacks to the party by the IBT.(Wikipedia n.d) After a failed appeal of the non-participation clause of his release as well as other failed attempts at regaining some semblance of control over the Teamsters Hoffa disappeared in 1975 when he allegedly had a meeting with mobsters at a Detroit restaurant.(Wikipedia n.d) (Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2004) In this decade when Robert Kennedy was appointed the Attorney General under his brother John F Kennedy's presidency that the Crime and Rackets section of the Justice Department that specifically generated laws for various offenses relating to organized crime including those affiliated with businesses such as racketeering, illegal payouts and incentives